1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the invention relate to a keyboard. More specifically, embodiments of the invention relate to a compact, portable, wireless keyboard for use with mobile devices.
2. Background
Portable devices such as smartphones like the iPhone™ and Android™-based phones, as well as tablet computers such as the iPad™, have become ubiquitous and their market share in the overall computing field has continued to grow. A dominant complaint of users of such devices is the absence of a real keyboard for efficient typing. Efforts to address this problem have followed two general tracks: (i) repurposing existing compact keyboards to interface with these devices or (ii) creating compact “candy bar” keyboards, which are unsuitable for touch-typing. A problem with the first track is that the resultant keyboard is often bigger than the device for which it is designed to operate. As a mobile office option, this results in the tablet-keyboard combination being inferior to available laptops as the marginal gain in smaller size and weight is insufficient when compared to the functionality and computing power of available laptops. In the second case, shrunken form-factor keyboards are not satisfactory for touch-typing. While they will generally have keys arranged in a touch-typing format such as QWERTY, their physical size renders touch-typing impossible. It would therefore be desirable to develop a compact keyboard suitable for touch-typing.